Monday, September 04, 2006

A drug a day keeps the leukie away (I hope)...

So, we finally received the results from the hospital and for the fourth time in a row (or is it third?) and the amount of leukaemia in this knackered old body is on the run. To paraphrase Corporal Jones of 'Dad's Army' fame, "They don't like it up 'em." We are heading back to a stage called molecular remission, which is not like the normal remission people know but means that the best test available cannot detect anything at molecule level.

The test, called a Polymerase Chain Reaction test, or PCR for short takes a hunk of my bone-marrow (which ain't nice) and cells are grown in a lab. The test is capable of testing up to around a million cells and the result in this case is shown as a percentage of good stuff to bad stuff. Obviously the lower the percentage the better. It also indicates that the lower the leukie can be kept the less the chance of it progressing onto the next stage. Oh. You want the result? Okay...


0.083%!

Good, huh? I guess I may live a little longer, which would be useful as I have just signed up to do (and paid lots of money for) a 5 year English Langauge/Literature Honours Degree Course. Should be fun. Presumably now I am to be a student I can shower once a fortnight, grow my hair and get cheap beer in a bar...Hang on, I'm am almost grown-up so can do that anyway. Beer leads me onto...the frog.

Yes, frog fans, despite Trish and I attendng the annual Hop Festival in Faversham this weekend because of the drugs I was unable to imbibe, restricting myself to a couple of pints of Spitfire our little green amphibian did the partying for me. I am afraid to say his Bacchanalian side was let loose and he fell from his mighty lily-pad with an almighty 'PLOP' and discovered dark and murky depths not seen since Dante's Purgatorio. (Sorry, I feel the need to make these classical references now I a student). Not only did he have to be physically restrained from the nearest pole-dancing club (he can't even dance) his current missus, Kermeeta, has him firmly in the dog-house. Kermit suspects that she is nagging him but fortunately he cannot hear her as some b£"&^%£d is banging a drum between his non-existent froggy ears. (Anyone know of any good frog hangover cures?)

He eventually hopped back to base around 3am on Sunday morning and we found him in the back garden looking like this...


Not only did he down a bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape but managed to neck a bottle of pure Polish vodka and half a flagon of Potcheen and , yes, he is still feeling rather delicate. I think you will agree he deserves all he gets...

Must rush, Kerm needs another sick-bag...

XXXX



2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good result however lets hope your exams results are at the opposite end of the scale. I look forward to your first book.

How handy it is to have a frog who takes care of your hangovers I could have done with one of them yesterday as Sunday was fathers day in good old NZ and I made sure i toasted as many fathers as i could.

Anonymous said...

Just going through the motions so I can tell Mr Rawlings how it is done.